Pompeii

She wanders the empty streets, her feet, stumbling on the edges of the smooth round stones, her heels almost caught in the ruts in the road, engraved by wagon wheels from so many centuries ago.

She steps over a threshold, into the empty space of a house, the stones at the door almost curved to the concave places of the heart, to the murmurs of the flesh.  She stands in this center of the earth waiting for the woman to bend over an amphora of water or wine, waiting for a soft white robe to press past her as the woman prepares a feast of squab. 

What will be left when she is gone?  Will they find a white translucent shell and say she was there.  Will they find a baby picture of a curly haired auburn boy holding a sunburst daisy up in the air?  His copper hair speckled with light.  Will they say he must be hers?  Will they find strands of gray hair against a light blue rumpled sheet, or the imprint of a body in a flattened well of a chair, open copies of books, torn pages, a chipped  tooth in an egg cup, or a scratched drawing of a blue swirling lobster on thin yellowed paper?  Will they find a stray pearl or a thick maroon velvet ribbon?  Stained underwear or perhaps a crumbled note amidst the ruins?  

Will they discover the accusatory words drawn from memory or the terrible dreams of a girl who wakes up at night unable to breathe, lost in the serpentine alleys of a medieval city by the sea, un able to hear the rush of water against stone, unable to find the street that leads to the harbor, the path that opens into a wash of blue light?

Or will they find nothing.  Just the outlines of a house. 

She is the center of an empty world, the brick and mortar foundations still intact.  She hears the open-mouthed howls of the dead as the lava and pumice and gases and stones fill the sky and fall like a thick sheet of flame, a rain of fire.  In the quiet she hears their groans.  She sees their bodies petrified in stone.  The child grasping for her mother’s arm.  The old man caught in sleep, his hands covering his eyes.  The cowering young men, curled in almost fetal positions, and the old ones bent in a crouch, hiding their faces between their knees.  She sees the limbs of the dead, caught by surprise, in contorted angles of pain.  She imagines a burning that turns you inside out, out of yourself, out of your seared flesh. 

She sees the flames, the burning, and turns away.   Strolling down the Via Abondanza, she walks in and out of broken houses, listening for the echoes of past lives in this deserted city.  The windows of the half-shorn foundations gape like toothless mouths.  Occasionally signs of life remain:  the basin for the laundress, the grinding stone, the blackened loaf of bread, the water gurgling from a fountain, the spout surrounded by the mouth of a woman’s chipped face, a horn of plenty still held in her frozen white arm.  

And then she stops at the threshold of another small dwelling and looks down onto a mosaic floor.  And there it is:  wings, chips of light blue and gray mosaic, almost  floating like a cloud, drifting across the dull, darkened floor.  The bird takes shape.  Long spindly legs, the wings arched, ready for flight.  The dark eye still staring into space.  The bird, a translucent shadow, a glimpse of a crescent moon in the bright sky of day.   She tries to define the color.  Is it sea foam?  A light blue mist, like the edge of the horizon at the sea? The color makes her breathe deeply.  She doesn’t know if the bird is an ibis or a crane. 

She imagines its slight cry in a bloodless sky.

And what remains of a life?  A blackened egg petrified to stone.  The tilt of a wing in late afternoon light.

Jan Zlotnik Schmidt is a Professor of English at SUNY New Paltz where she teaches composition, creative writing, creative nonfiction, Holocaust literature and autobiography courses.  Her work has been featured in Kansas Quarterly, Alaska Quarterly Review, Cream City Review, HOme Planet News, and Wind, among other literary journals.  She also has published two collections of poetry through the Edwin Mellen Press (We Speak in Tongues; She Had This Memory).